Earmarks: The Alien Menace
The fine folks at Reason Magazine made this great video about some of Congress’s wasteful spending. It includes a special look at SETI, the long-time Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence project that hasn’t found any evidence of interplanetary communication signals since the late 1960s.
I guess the question is, are earmarks money well spent? SETI is a good idea, and costs virtually nothing, but maybe more wasteful earmarks are the just the cost of doing business. Compromise is the name of the game. Maybe important bills couldn’t get through without the little concessions like these.
Many earmarks are not for a lot of money, relatively speaking. But they do add up. They are the preferred method of politicians to pay back supporters and otherwise buy votes, with the citizenry’s money.
I have no problem with a program like SETI at all, but I don’t think it should be publicly funded in any way. Just one man’s opinion! :-)
True, most earmarks could use a trimming, but SETI should be left alone. The results could be enormous: we might contact a race of aliens, expert in auto maintenance, who could dramatically reduce our need for oil, so that we’d never need to drill again!
True! Who knows what wonders an alien civilization might bring to us! The benefits would be manifold!